robert mccrum | the 10 best first lines in fiction

NOTES from the UNDERGROUND  No.  215 (& Poetry Dispatch) | April 30, 2012

The 10 Best First Lines in Fiction

(Our Guide to the greatest lines of novel in the English language from Jane Austen to James Joyce—The Guardian)

James Joyce

Ulysses (1922)

“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” This is the classic third-person opening to the 20th-century novel that has shaped modern fiction, pro and anti, for almost a hundred years. As a sentence, it is possibly outdone by the strange and lyrical beginning of Joyce’s final and even more experimental novel, Finnegans Wake: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”

Jane Austen

Pride and Prejudice (1813)

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” The one everyone knows (and quotes). Parodied, spoofed, and misremembered, Austen’s celebrated zinger remains the archetypal First Line for an archetypal tale. Only Dickens comes close, with the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light etc…”

Charlotte Brontë

Jane Eyre (1847)

“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.” The polar opposite to Austen and Dickens, this line plunges the reader into the narrative, but in a low-key tone of disappointed expectations that captures Jane Eyre’s dismal circumstances. Brontë nails Jane’s hopeless prospects in 10 words. At the same time, the reader can hardly resist turning the first page. There’s also the intriguing contrast in tone with her sister Emily, who opens Wuthering Heights with: “I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.”

Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

“You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by a Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.” The influence of this opening reverberates throughout the 20th century, and nowhere more so than in JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like… and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

PG Wodehouse

The Luck of the Bodkins (1935)

“Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.” A classic English comic opening, perfectly constructed to deliver the joke in the final phrase, this virtuoso line also illustrates its author’s uncanny ear for the music of English. Contrast the haunting brevity of Daphne du Maurier in Rebecca, partly situated in the south of France, and also published in the 1930s: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. “

Anthony Burgess

Earthly Powers (1980)

“It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.” This is one of the supreme show-off first-person openings. Burgess challenges the reader (and himself) to step on to the roller coaster of a very tall tale (loosely based on the life of Somerset Maugham). It is matched by Rose Macaulay’s famous opening to The Towers of Trebizond: “‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.”

Dodie Smith

I Capture the Castle (1948)

“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.” A brilliant beginning to a much-loved English classic, which tells us almost all we need to know about the narrator Cassandra Mortmain. Quirky and high-spirited, Dodie Smith’s novel is really an exercise in nostalgia. Smith (subsequently famous for The Hundred and One Dalmatians) was living in 1940s California, and wrote this story, in a sustained fever of nostalgia, to remind her of home. Perhaps only an English writer could extract so much resonance from that offbeat reference to “the kitchen sink.”

Sylvia Plath

The Bell Jar (1963)

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.” Postwar American first lines don’t come much more angsty or zeitgeisty than this. Compare Saul Bellow’s Herzog: “If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.” First published under the pseudonym “Victoria Lucas”, this first novel seems to parallel Sylvia Plath’s own descent into suicide. In fact, The Bell Jar was published only a month after its author’s tragic death in the bleak winter of 1963h resonance from that offbeat reference to “the kitchen sink.

Donna Tartt

The Secret History (1992)

“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.” In this spooky opening, Tartt plunges the reader into the middle of a crime whose consequences will reverberate throughout the ensuing pages. Like all the best beginnings, the sentence also tells us something about the narrator, Richard Papen. He’s the outsider in a group of worldly students at Hampden College in rural Vermont. He was expecting a break from his bland suburban Californian life, but he doesn’t quite understand what he’s got himself into.”

Robert Louis Stevenson

Treasure Island (1883)

“Squire Trelawnay, Dr Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17– and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof.” Among the most brilliant and enthralling opening lines in the English language.

[from: The Guardian The Observer, Robert McCrum, Saturday, April 28, 2012]

Editor’s Note: I’m sure not everyone would agree with these ten choices, still it’s a pleasure to entertain them, recall some of these first lines or be introduced to others for the very first time. Though I agree most with Joyce’s, Ulysses and Twain’s, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I would add some favorite first lines of mine:

Herman Melville

Moby Dick (1851)

“Call me Ishmael.”

Ernest Hemingway

The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

“He was an old man who fished alone in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.”

Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita (1955)

“Light of my life, fire of my loins.”

Ralph Ellison

Invisible Man (1952)

“I am an invisible man.”

Charles Dickens

A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

arbor day | alice d’alessio | jim robbins

Photo by Norbert Blei

POETRY DISPATCH No.369 | April 27, 2012

Enter
………the Forest

Find the path where rain drips from beechlings
brightening their greenest green
trembling the twisted ties
of yellow moccasin flowers.

Pay homage to cedars,
robed in lace, their spongy
carpet a velvet dusk, breathe their incense;
lay hands on ironwood and linden,
each with its secrets. Come with me

I will show you the way. Here in this temple
we study the Druid fathers
learn to grow old proudly,
chant the psalm of the hemlock.
We will hold white limestone in our hands,
recite the only prayers we know.

Alice D’Alessio

WHY TREES MATTER

by
Jim Robbins*

Helena, Mont.
TREES are on the front lines of our changing climate. And when the oldest trees in the world suddenly start dying, it’s time to pay attention.

North America’s ancient alpine bristle-cone forests are falling victim to a vora¬cious beetle and an Asian fungus. In Texas, a prolonged drought killed more than five million urban shade trees last year and an additional half-billion trees in parks and forests. In the Amazon, two severe droughts have killed billions more.

The common factor has been hotter, drier weather.

We have underestimated the importance of trees. They are not merely pleasant sources of shade but a potentially major answer to some of our most pressing environmental problems. We take them for granted, but they are a near miracle. In a bit of natural alchemy called photosynthesis, for example, trees turn one of the seemingly most insubstantial things of all — sunlight — into food for insects, wildlife and people, and use it to create shade, beauty and wood for fuel, furniture and homes.

For all of that, the unbroken forest that once covered much of the continent is now shot through with holes.

Humans have cut down the biggest and best trees and left the runts behind, What does that mean for the genetic fit¬ness of our forests? No one knows for sure, for trees and forests are poorly understood on almost all levels. “It’s embarrassing how little we know,” one eminent redwood researcher told me.

What we do know, however, suggests that what trees do is essential though often not obvious. Decades ago, Katsuhiko Matsunaga, a marine chemist at Hokkaido University in Japan, discovered that when tree leaves decompose, they leach acids into the ocean that help fertilize plankton. When plankton thrive, so does the rest of the food chain. In a campaign called Forests Are Lovers of the Sea, fishermen have replanted forests along coasts and rivers to bring back fish and oyster stocks. And they have returned.

Trees are nature’s water filters, capable of cleaning up the most toxic wastes, including explosives, solvents and organic wastes, largely through a dense community of microbes around the tree’s roots that clean water in exchange for nutrients, a process known as phytore-mediation. A 2008 study by researchers at Columbia University found that more trees in urban neighborhoods correlate with a lower incidence of asthma.

In Japan, researchers have long studied what they call “forest bathing.” A walk in the woods, they say, reduces the level of stress chemicals in the body and increases natural killer cells in the immune system, which fight tumors and viruses. Studies in inner cities show that anxiety, depression and even crime are lower in a landscaped environment.

Trees also release vast clouds of beneficial chemicals. On a large scale, some of these aerosols appear to help regulate the climate; others are anti-bacterial, anti-fungal and anti-viral. We need to learn much more about the role these chemicals play in nature. One of these substances, taxane, from the Pacific yew tree, has become a powerful treatment for breast and other cancers. Aspirin’s active ingredient comes from willows.

Trees are greatly underutilized as an eco-technology. “Working trees” could absorb some of the excess phosphorus and nitrogen that run off farm fields and help heal the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. In Africa, millions of acres of parched land have been reclaimed through strategic tree growth.

Trees are also the planet’s heat shield. They keep the concrete and asphalt of cities and suburbs 10 or more degrees cooler and protect our skin from the sun’s harsh UV rays. The Texas Department of Forestry has estimated that the die-off of shade trees will cost Texans hundreds of millions of dollars more for air-conditioning. Trees, of course, sequester carbon, a greenhouse gas that makes the planet warmer. A study by the Carnegie Institution for Science also found that water vapor from forests lowers ambient temperatures.

A big question is, which trees should we be planting? Ten years ago, I met a shade tree farmer named David Milarch, a co-founder of the Champion Tree Project who has been cloning some of the world’s oldest and largest trees to protect their genetics, from California redwoods to the oaks of Ireland. “These are the supertrees, and they have stood the test of time,” he says.

Science doesn’t know if these genes will be important on a warmer planet, but an old proverb seems apt, “When Is the best time to plant a tree?” The answer: “Twenty years ago. The second-best time? Today.”

*Jim Robbins is the author of the forthcoming book “The Man Who Planted Trees.” [Source: New York Times, April 12, 2012

Planting
................the Trees

You came and planted trees!
Braving April drizzle, you cradled
your twigs, searched out
the colored stakes, dug holes
and firmed the mud around the microscopic roots.

Now three days past, I roam
the lumpy stream bed, where nettle
and angelica invade in ragged clumps,
admiring my young shoots-
thin embryos of trees, like miniatures
for a Lilliputian world, where thumb-sized people
plow their rug-sized fields.

These are my countdown years.
As tree cells grow--
patiently sending nutrients
up and down their sticky veins—
and mine deplete,
how can I say what joy they'll bring,
these simple sticks? Already a bug-sized leaf
unfolds its crenulated edge. Those that survive
to turn their juices into syrup,
or flaunt fall's banners
become the friends who placed them here.

Alice D’Alessio

[from: A BLESSING OF TREES, Cross+Roads Press #21, 2004, o.p.]

rebecca mead | love’s labour

Illustration by Gerald Scarfe

NOTES from the UNDERGROUND  No. 214 (& Poetry Dispatch) | April 25, 2012

BOOKS

LOVE’S LABOR

Monogamy, Marriage, and other menaces
by
Rebecca Mead

In 1643, John Milton published his “Doctrine & Discipline of Divorce,” an essay addressed to the members of the English Parliament, in which he de­plored matrimonial laws that impris­oned the unhappily married in “a droop­ing and disconsolate household captivity, without refuge or redemption.” But the “Doctrine of Divorce” is also the reverse of what its title suggests; in defending divorce, Milton offers a meditation on what a marriage worth the name might consist of. In his tenderest phrase, Mil­ton (whose own first, unhappy marriage must have been instructive in these mat­ters) writes, “In God’s intention, a meet and happy conversation is the chiefest and noblest end of marriage.” Milton would have understood “conversation” in a broader sense than we do now. The word derives from the Latin verb conversari, which means to live together, with connotations of habitual proximity and cooperation. Milton is not referring to marital chatter about school districts or visits to the in-laws or the follies of the Bush Administration, or even the familiar, forlorn spousal inquiry “What are you thinking about?” The conversa­tion of true marriage, he suggests, is an intimate, easy, fruitful intercourse: not talk but life itself.

In a droll, overstated new book, “Against Love: A Polemic” (Pantheon; $24), Laura Kipnis describes a different kind of marital conversation. “As is true of all human languages, the language of coupledom is governed by a finite set of rules that determine what can be verbal­ized and how,” she writes in a section ti­tled “Couple Linguistics 101.” “Close observation reveals that this is a language comprising one recurring unit of speech the interdiction.” Kipnis spends the next ten pages of her book enumerating some of those interdictions, “a catalogue of strictures, commands and punishment so unending that you will begin to wonder why no one has yet invoked the Geneva Convention when it comes to cou­ple relations”:

You can’t leave the dishes for later, wash the dishes badly, not use soap, drink straight from the container, make crumbs without wiping them up (now, not later), or load the dishwasher according to the method that seems most sensible to you…You can’t not make the bed. You can’t not express appreci­ation when the other person makes the bed even if you don’t care. You can’t sleep apart, you can’t go to bed at different times, you can’t fall asleep on the couch without getting woken up to go to bed. You can’t eat in bed. You can’t get out of bed right away after sex. You can’t have insomnia without being grilled about what’s really bothering you.

In Kipnis’s characterization, the do­mestic captivity that is marriage is com­plete and relentless, with surveillance, repression, and prohibition built into its very structure.

Kipnis teaches in the department of radio, television, and film at Northwest­ern University, and an earlier incarnation of “Against Love” appeared in 1998 in the journal Critical Inquiry. In Critical Inquiry, her lively prose was buttressed by footnotes invoking names familiar from the nation’s cultural-studies curric­ula: Herbert Marcuse, Jean Laplanche, Fredric Jameson, Julia Kristeva, and, of course, Marx and Engels. Those refer­ences have been considerably pruned in the book-length version, though the germ of their ideas still informs the text. The result is a deft indictment of the marital ideal, as well as a celebration of the dissent that constitutes adultery, de­livered in pointed daggers of prose. In a typical flourish, Chapter 2 begins, “Adultery is one wav of protesting the confines of coupled life; of course there’s always murder.” Reading Kipnis is rather like sitting next to an engagingly acerbic guest at a dinner party—great run for an evening, if somewhat curdling to the digestion.

Kipnis, alighting upon the psycho-therapeutic bromide that relationships take work, asks, “When did the rhetoric of the factory become the default lan­guage of love?” It’s an interesting ques­tion, but she doesn’t answer it. Instead, she takes the metaphor of work at its word, characterizing ours as an age “when monogamy becomes labor, when desire is organized contractually, with accounts kept and fidelity extracted like labor from employees, with marriage a domestic factory policed by means of rigid shop-floor discipline.”

And this, of course, is where Marx comes in: “If love is the latest form of alienated labor, would rereading ‘Capital’ as a marriage manual be the most ap­propriate response?” (One could charita­bly take that “rereading” to be a nice little joke about the preoccupations of cultural-studies academics, rather than an expression of it.) Pursuing the analogy of love and labor, Kipnis declares that marital fidelity inevitably evolves into what she calls, after Marx, “surplus mo­nogamy: enforced compliance rather than a free expression of desire.” Submitting to the repressive regime of marriage, then, is an enactment in miniature of a larger and more tragic social conformity.

Much of die book consists of an ar­gument against companionate coupledom, the condition to which—or so popular culture, legal systems, and reli­gious institutions insist—we all aspire. “Domestic couplceom [is] modern love’s mandatory barracks,” Kipnis says. “Do­mestic coupledom is the boot camp for compliant citizenship.” In support of her case, she cites the familiar divorce statis­tics showing that half of all American marriages end in divorce; the resigned verdicts passed upon the institution of matrimony by such authorities as Sigmund Freud (“One does not venture to declare aloud and openly that marriage is not an arrangement calculated to satisfy a man’s sexuality, unless one is driven to do so perhaps by the love of truth and eagerness for reform”); and the well-rehearsed argument that romantic love as the foundation of an enduring mar­riage is an invention of modernity, un­known to ancient Greeks, courtly lovers, or the centuries’ worth of marriageable sons and daughters who served as cur­rency in parental property transactions.

The structure of contemporary marriage, with its expectations of lifetime fidelity, belongs to the apparatus of state control. A population that willingly polices itself through the interdictions of married life, Kipnis argues, has given up any revolutionary strivings, and will submit to other repressive social orders— capitalism, say—without protest. “Let’s imagine that to achieve consensus and continuity, any society is required to pro­duce the kinds of character structures and personality types it needs to achieve its objective,” she writes.” What mysteri­ous force or mind-altering substance could compel an entire population into such total social integration without them even noticing it happening, or ut­tering the tiniest peep of protest? What if it could be accomplished through love?

The hero of Kipnis’s story is adultery. Conducting an adulterous affair amounts to a courageous insurrection against an inhuman social order. “Adultery is the sit-down strike of the love-takes-work ethic,” she says; it is, in fact, the “anarcho-syndicalism of private life.” And she has the revolutionary’s disdain for ameliorist measures. Addressing marital dissatis­faction through divorce and remarriage amounts, in her view, to a submission to cultural norms: serial monogamy, the ap­proved cultural therapy for the failure of monogamy proper, is “liberal reformism writ familial’1—the participant? change, but the institution survives intact. Kip­nis, who, unfortunately, feels the need to preface her book with the explanation that a polemic is inherently extremist and not to be taken entirely seriously, sug­gests that the structure of marriage might be rethought. “It’s generally understood that falling in love means committing to commitment,” she writes. “Different social norms could entail something en­tirely different: yearly renewable con­tracts, for example.”

Given the census data on divorce, Kipnis suggests, the reasonable thing to do would be to factor the likely de­mise of half of American marriages into policy decisions. Instead, the public has been subject to lectures on marital recti­tude by politicians like Newt Gingrich and Bob Livingston, who have either transgressed their own nuptial vows or vowed marital fidelity successively to dif­ferent women. Kipnis devotes much of her book to the way that adultery, in the nineteen-nineties, burst out of the pri­vate sphere and into the political, cre­ating a new political style, which she describes ‘as spousal: “Would you want to be married to this politician?” Bill Clinton was hardly the first adulterous United States President, but his trans­gressions, she suggests, occurred at a mo­ment when the self-deception upon which the concept of monogamy is founded could no longer be sustained. The Clinton-Lewinsky scandal pro­vided an arena for the national ambivalence about marriage: “If there were a Starr Report on every American mar­riage, the institution would instantly crumble, never to recover.”

Kipnis is disappointed in Clinton for failing to embrace his inner adulterer and for capitulating to the ruling mari­tal order with his denials, apologies, and efforts to patch things up with his wife, ” now Senator Clinton. (Yes, he would want to be married to this politician.) A better role model, she thinks, is Steven R, Johnson, the ranking Republican in the Indiana state senate. When he was found to have committed “inappropriate” rela­tions with one of his interns, he ad­mitted to the affair, expressed regret, was removed from his committee chair­manship, and was ultimately separated from his wife. In the midst of all that, he issued a public statement saying that, “in a very strange sense,” he had been given “an opportunity to start my life again.”

Kipnis considers this quickening newness to be adultery’s highest good; “It is at least a reliable way of proving to ourselves that we’re not quite in the ground yet.” She is extremely funny on the allures of extramarital romance, de­scribing the overdetermined encounter at the academic conference (“You slowly become aware of a muffled but not com­pletely unfamiliar feeling stirring deep within, a distant rumbling getting louder and louder, like a herd of elephants massing on the bushveld…. Oh, God, it’s your libido, once a well-known free­dom fighter, now a sorry, shriveled thing, from swaggering outlaw to model citi­zen, Janis Joplin to Barry Manilow in just a few short decades”) which leads to the secret phone calls, the elaborately concealed meetings, and the flushed ex­changes. She’s gimlet-eyed about the myriad self-deceptions of adultery—the conviction that one’s lover has the pow­ers of understanding of Socrates, the sexual technique of Casanova, and the capacity for sympathy of Mother Te­resa—and about the arrangement’s nar­cissistic rewards. “What really keeps you glued to the phone till all hours of the night—conversations sparkling with soulfulness and depth you hadn’t known you possessed, exchanging those search­ing whispered intimacies—is a very dif­ferent new love-object: yourself. The new beloved mirrors this fascinating new self back to you, and admit it, you’re madly in. love with both of them.” Though Kipnis is aware that adultery has its own con­tradictions (it couldn’t exist without mar­riage, for starters), she is won over by what it offers: a rekindling of sexual desire.

Indeed, for someone with such a skep­tical eye for the supposed eternal ver­ities, Kipnis gives lust a free ride. “We’re inherently desiring creatures,” she says. “And sometimes desire just won’t take no for an answer.” For all her insistence on the historical specificity of our no­tions of romantic love, Kipnis treats the kind of sexual desire that surfaces during academic conferences as if it were trans-historical and transcultural, rather than being conditional upon the ready avail­ability of a range of alternative partners and effective contraception, both of which are historical novelties, particu­larly for women. Kipnis is at her most incisive when writing about what she considers to be the desire-free zone of a long-term marriage. “Embarrassing, isn’t it, how long you can go without it, if you don’t remember to have it, and how much more inviting a good night’s sleep can seem compared to those over-rehearsed acts,” she writes. “Even though it used to be pretty good—if memory serves—before there was all that sar­casm. Or disappointment. Or children. Or history.”

“Against Love” Invariably depicts the diminishing of sexual desire as a loss, and although it is a taboo of contempo­rary culture to admit to feeling other­wise, this was not always the case: it isn’t hard to see why women exhausted by years of dangerous childbearing might happily have greeted the ebbing of sex­ual desire, particularly that of their part­ner. Kipnis does pay lip service to the functions of marriage beyond the sex­ual—”Companionship, shared housing costs, childrearing convenience, reassur­ing predictability, occasional sex, insur­ance against the destabilizing effects of non-domestic desire”—but her enumer­ation seems delivered in the spirit of those legally required disclosures of pharmaceutical side effects. Unfettered sexual desire, for her, trumps all other inclinations. That view, as it happens, puts her in the company of the con­servative churchmen against whom Mil­ton railed in his divorce tract, since just about the only ground on which a divorce could be granted in the mid-seventeenth century was that of adultery. To Milton, this amounted to a sacrile­gious reduction of marriage to nothing bur avenue for sexual relations: “What is this but secretly to instruct us, that how­ever many grave reasons are pretended to the married life, yet that nothing indeed is thought worth regard therein but the prescribed satisfaction of an irrational heat?” Kipnis’s celebration of this irra­tional heat leaves no room for the notion that the first achings of desire might evolve within marriage into less thermal satisfactions.

Falling in love is the nearest most of us come to glimpsing Utopia in our life­times (with sex and drugs as fallbacks),” .she writes. But what if Utopia was not merely glimpsed in the heady, vanishing moment of falling in love but was actu­ally the project of enduring love? What if the expression of that love was the ongo­ing construction of a better world in do­mestic microcosm—of Milton’s meet and happy conversation? Rather than seeing each individual marriage as a cog in a tyrannical industrial machine that manufactures large-scale social docility, we might re-reread Marx to come up with an alternative understanding of how the language of work might relate to the language of love. Perhaps love isn’t nec­essarily the alienated labor of the factory floor. Perhaps it can be the kind of work mat Marx argued was displaced by the inhuman character of industrialization: the meaningful, satisfying work of the farmer or the artisan who remained or­ganically connected to the fruits of his labor, and who was ennobled by this ef­fort. Conducted with imagination, the labor of this love might be so gratifying as to be indistinguishable from play.

[from: THE NEW YORKER, August 11, 2003]

Hoy No Tengo Tiempo | Painting by Norbert Blei

xi chuang | exhortations

POETRY DISPATCH No. 368 | April 18, 2012

XI CHUAN

Exhortations

Struck down a shadow, stood up a man.

Trees eavesdrop on trees, birds eavesdrop on birds; when a viper stiffens and attacks a passing human it becomes human.

You examine your face in the mirror, affronting a stranger.

The law sayeth: any man to loot a burning house shall be put to death, any man to sell dogmeat as mutton shall meet with retribution, any man to cast glances east and west shall find a snare at his feet, any man of chicken gizzard pettiness shall be spit upon. But I must supplement this, as I have seen monkeys on the fast track just as capable as men on the fast track, their muscles equally developed, their methods equally unscrupulous.

So the sunflower really is a flower!

Why have cats and not tigers become our pets?

Small little pain, a feeling like sand gushing into the eye—who will compensate me?

A book will change me, if I want to grasp ii; a girl will change me, if I want to praise her; a road will change me, if I want to go its distance; a coin will change me, if I want to possess it.I change someone living beside me, and I am changed; my single conscience makes us both suf­fer, my own selfish distractions make us both blush.

The truth cannot be public, echoless thoughts arc hard to sing.

Wrath makes incantations malfunction.

Why give a compass to a sailor in distress on the seas?

Don’t demand too much of the world. Don’t hold on to your sleeping wife while dreaming of high-yield margins. Don’t light lamps in the daytime. Don’t smear people’s faces. Remember: don’t piss in the wild. Don’t sing in a cemetery. Don’t take promises lightly. Don’t be annoy­ing. Make wisdom something useful.

Static shadows can be scorned but veneration for shifting shadows must be maintained.

Sunbirds strive to fly, but who’s chasing them away?

What kind of good luck can end your left eyelid’s incessant flitting?

[from: NOTES ON THE MOSQUITO, Selected Poems, New Directions, 2012]

SEE ALSO: http://bashosroad.outlawpoetry.com/xi-chuan-answering-venus-45-fragments-excerpts/xi-chuan/haiku/

bob edwards | a voice in the box

NOTES______________________from the UNDERGROUND No. 213 (& Poetry Dispatch) | April 9, 2012

RADIO LOVE

Bob Edwards: A VOICE IN THE BOX

Editor’s Note: “Radio Love” … I don’t know what else to call it, this feeling. It attracted my attention as a young child…the kitchen radio on top the refrigerator where my father listened to the news…Gabriel Heatter: “There’s good news tonight!” and Walter Winchell: “Good Evening Mr. and Mrs. America from border to border and coast to coast and all the ships at sea. Let’s go to press.” Talk about drama! That little wooden radio…which my mother tuned to an ethnic music station on Friday evening and sang along in Czech…where I listened to the Shadow, the Lone Ranger, Superman, etc. Where Arthur Godfrey was always on the air singing: “It Seems Like Old Times…” Where I first heard the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

And that large living room console where the three of us listened and laughed in the dark to Jack Benny, Fibber McGee and Molly, Amos and Andy, Fred Allen, and Bob Hope.

Those were the days, my friend…

Yes they were. And so they continue into the present, thanks to the gods of the airwaves who refuse to be silenced in our high-tech times. Television never did kill radio. Never will.

I must caution myself at this point from writing a full-blown piece on my radio love affairs. There’s so much to remember. So much to praise. All those voices which resonate within me to this day.

I still see myself as a young boy in my bedroom…fiddling with a crystal set trying to bring in a station! That’s how far back my initial love affair goes. Followed later in my Chicago life by a more gown-up, more cultural, in some ways more exciting new love affair with WFMT, the voice and passion of Studs Terkel, “The Midnight Special” every Saturday night…classical music, the knowledge and comforting voice my friend, Marty Robinson, brought to the airwaves. How thankful I remain today in Wisconsin, forty plus years later, for the role radio still plays in my life, 24 hours a day—tuned to Wisconsin Public Radio and NPR. How appreciative I am of one voice alone, the many hours of program pleasure and thought the recently retired Jean Feraca brought to us lucky to share her interview skills, her thought and laughter. (Scroll down.)

But let me introduce you to Bob Edwards–who needs no introduction if you listened to NPR faithfully and followed his voice past and present.

His book: A VOICE IN THE BOX, My Life in RADIO is a history, a memoir, a romance with radio—a testament to the beauty of communication that expands our minds and imagination by the simple art of lending an ear, listening in a way

one’s life depended upon it. Which in some ways, it always has.

A few excerpts. The voice of Bob Edwards. Stay tuned… –Norbert Blei

REDEMPTION

November 6, 2004. Another cold, crisp night in the Windy City, but it’s warm inside the Grand Ballroom of the Renaissance Chicago Hotel, where hundreds of radio royalty have gathered. Men in tuxedos and women in beautiful gowns or sexy cocktail dresses are clustered at thirty-four tables, each adorned with flowers and a burning candle. At one end of the ballroom is a bandstand, where Mickey and the Memories will entertain for everyone’s dancing pleasure. That will come later, after dinner, many speeches, and a ceremony that is also a live radio program carried by the Premier group of stations.

The announcer is Jim Bohannon, one of my oldest friends in radio. He has alerted the diners to the Applause sign behind him and has let it be known that great audible enthusiasm is encouraged. At exactly 8:00 PM, we hear some upbeat theme music, and all respond to the sign’s insistent demand for applause. A floor director cues Bohannon, who says, “Live, from Chicago, it’s radio’s biggest night—the 2004 Radio Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Tonight, the Radio Hall of Fame inducts XM Satellite Radio superstar Bob Edwards.”

Superstar? We do love our hyperbole in radio. As of that night, my show on XM was just four weeks old. I doubt if the fellow who, months earlier, fired me from my previous show at NPR regarded me as anybody’s superstar. But no matter—I was in the Hall.

Radio is closing in on its centennial, and its Hall of Fame includes the scientists who invented it, the hucksters who made money from it, the journalists who informed, the smart people who enlightened, and especially the enormously talented entertainers who came into our homes and cars and offices and made us laugh, cry, wince, fear, dread, guffaw, and enter worlds we could not imagine on our own. So here I am with Marconi, Edward R. Murrow, Arthur Godfrey, Alan Freed, Fibber McGee and Molly, Amos ‘n’ Andy, Orson Welles, Paul Harvey, Wolfman Jack, Bing Crosby, Gordon McLendon, Studs Terkel, Ma Perkins. Cousin Brucie, Red Barber, the Lone Ranger—just a stew of people, programs, and genres spanning generations and having nothing in common but the microphone and an audience.

My induction ceremony was a watershed event—the last in a series of traumas and triumphs that had kept me in a state of emotional whiplash for most of the year. So this night in Chicago was the end of something but also the beginning of something. It symbolized my passage to a new radio home and an environment in which I could do what I regard as the very best work of my career.

Induction really recognizes a much longer journey—the span of a career. So let’s go back to the little burg where my radio journey began in 1968, when I had no notion of a hall of fame—only a burning desire to be a voice in the box.

LAUNCH

…As the ABC anchor cued the station break, I flipped the switch and spoke the first words of my broadcast career: “This is WHEL, 1570, in New Albany, Indiana.”

There were no fireworks in celebration and my debut escaped the notice of the local newspapers, but there’s nothing bigger in a young man’s life than realizing his dream. Never mind that I was working at the tackiest, most miserable little outpost in American broadcasting; I had crossed the threshold and joined the profession of Edward R. Murrow, Arthur Godfrey, and Red Barber.

Why wouldn’t I be thrilled at joining the club? For nearly fifty years, broadcasters had informed and entertained Americans in ways that newspapers, magazines, theater, and motion pictures could not. They had made it possible for citizens to feel present at events occurring far away. Murrow’s rooftop broadcasts during the London Blitz brought World War II into the living rooms of Manhattan apartments and Iowa farmhouses. Earlier, people short on hope during the Great Depression heard reassuring words from their president on the radio, and radio performers offered the only professional entertainment most Americans could afford. Baseball fans no longer had to gather at the local newspaper office to be relayed telegraph reports of the World Series. Graham McNamee in the twenties and Red Barber in the thirties magically transported fans in the bayous and the Rockies to the ballparks of New York, Chicago, and Detroit. Arthur Godfrey, on radio and then on television, brought a folksy personality to the airwaves and made his audience comfortable with the entertainers he introduced.

VOICE

Little boys want to be firefighters or athletes or rock stars. I wanted to be on the radio. The radio in our house was a handsome mahogany Zenith purchased by my parents when they married in 1939, Now decorating my living room, the Zenith Long Distance Radio remains a marvel to me. It’s more than three-and-a-half feet high, more than two feet wide, and a foot and a half deep. It doubles as a piece of furniture, the perfect pedestal for flowers in a vase next to a framed portrait of Grandma. As a toddler, I ran my fingernails across the fabric covering the huge speaker at the base. Reaching high and to the left, I could touch the knobs and buttons (voice, normal, treble, alto, bass). To the right were the push buttons labeled with the call letters of stations that don’t exist today. Frequencies were listed in clock-face fashion, shortwave stations forming the upper arc, the AM band on the lower arc. At “noon” on the clock face and out of my reach was the mysterious green light that peered at all in the room.

With a tall outside antenna, our radio could pick up foreign broadcasts, ships at sea, police calls, and ham operators, but we didn’t bother with that. We listened to the network programs that had yet to make the switch to television. Soap operas were still on the radio; Our Gal Sunday and The Romance of Helen Trent were my grandmother’s favorites. I remember hearing President Truman talk about the war in Korea, Just before suppertime, a local priest would lead the rosary and Mom would insist that I pray along.

So many voices coming out of that box fascinated me. It didn’t matter what the voices were saying; I longed for mine to join them. In time, I learned the formats of all the local stations and knew the schedules of all the announcers. At night, I heard other voices on stations in Chicago, Nashville, New Orleans, and Cincinnati, and I’d dream of seeing those places someday. Everything said on the radio had my attention in those days, not just the news. I would have been perfectly content to be the fellow who said, “You’re listening to the music of…” or “Tune in tomorrow for another thrilling adventure of….” I just wanted to be one of the voices in the box.

[from: A VOICE IN THE BOX, My Life in Radio, the University Press of Kentucky, 2011]

jean feraca | rendered into paradise

POETRY DISPATCH No. 367 | March 30, 2012

JEAN FERACA

by
Norbert Blei

My first draft (attempt) to say goodbye ran about 2,000 words, 6 pages. I’ve worked, reworked, trashed most of it, rescued a few notes, some personal memories…and here I come now (still a work-in-progress) huffing and puffing toward your “last-day-on-the-Wisconsin-airwaves” for you (for me, for so many of us)…trying to confess (outside the box) in a few sentences how I loved/love this woman and will oh-so- sorely miss her voice, her laughter, her sense of woman, self, spirit, direction— leave-it-to-me-I-know-what’s-good-for-you. Her choice of guests to interview in her own Feracian way. Her tantalizing tongue/taste in food–a bowl of soup, a slice of bread, a glass of wine (and Thou listening in the wilderness). Erotic desserts fit for only gods (take a deep bite…there, isn’t that divine?). Savor this, that, everything this woman with her heart in her stomach puts on whatever table she has set for you: “Come, mangi! mangi!”

“And here, try this!”—thought, idea, feeling, guest from another part of the world, another planet. “How do you like them apples, buster?” Followed by that, ground swelling, guttural, free-falling, ethereal laughter…strains, volume, cadences that reach back to ethnic Italian-Americana…to family, neighborhood, the streets of Brooklyn up, up in the air…rolling thunder shaped, accentuated by flying hands. The real McCoy, this one. And we were SO damn lucky she brought the whole body and soul of herself here to Wisconsin, where we could kind of claim her as one of us… Call in. Talk to her. Find ourselves on her wavelengths.

Jesus! What are we/what am I going to do without you, out here in these lonely Wisconsin woods? Where IS Feraca on my radio dial? My i-pod? My frequency? A silent Feraca is a mean punishment. Talk about “women of spirit”! –as she often did, as she was prone to.

Oh, blessed art thou, Sister Jean (a little inside humor we shared…a kind of hipster Catholicism salvaged from too many crosses at too many stations not to mention Bless-Me-Fathers…for sins about to be savored)…Sister Jean, you were destined for the convent, though no habit of any description could ever contain you. Your sisterhood went far beyond the hood.

I rummage through these old notes of mine…How I used to enjoy introducing you at times by calling you my second (third?) wife (fictitious)…or how I was a reject priest and you a salacious nun…(fictitious) and we were both doomed to dream in Latin the rest of our lives. Burn vigil lights far deep our nights. Say three Our Fathers and Three Hail Marys just for the hell of it, dwell everyday on the sorrowful mysteries of the rosary.

There was no escape from Introíbo ad altǎre Dei. Ever.

But I must end this….the second hand is moving On Air. I must find a way to give you the last word.

I want for you everything you may want or need in your lives ahead. For sure, I want more of your glorious poetry—the real voice behind the real voice.

And as for “happiness”?

Maybe begin here… Eat your own words, baby…

Happiness

It was Swami Satchadananda who set her straight.
You are the source of your own happiness, he told her
out of the blue, looking her straight in the eye
and tapping it into her chest.

Then came the bridegroom, pressing his suit.
Are you capable of happiness? he quizzed her.
This was serious. He had put it to the test
She checked the box marked Yes.
A choice. A deliverance.

All this came as a great surprise
to one who had pressed her face against the glass.
Happiness had passed her by like the boys on their flexible flyers.
It was a shock to have it show up now like her mother in a nightgown
standing on the schoolbus steps waving a lost lunch.

But, no, I must interrupt this poem…this search for a proper poetic Goodbye message, right now, here-on-earth, to bring you…Another tone I hunger for…beyond happiness…

Ah yes…here it is:

Bacchus at St. Benedict’s

I
Three days after I settled in at the monastery
Bacchus paid me a visit in late afternoon.

I had been waiting all day under the slick leaves of the oaks,
pacing from porch to pool in the heat.
Even the great bell lost its claim on my mind.
I was tuned
to a subtler meld—the faint crush
of gravel on the dirt road.

He was out in a flash, teeth, shades,
sun shining through his red hand, upraised.
It gleamed, waving the wine.
“I found a 1983 botrytis Semillon!” he sang
to someone who’d been chanting psalms three days.

2
The first surge was the pool, waking up
to his wide plunge.
Big-eyed, I watched the water seize,
rocked to its knees.

We set out along a meadow sliced by swallows
when the sky was turning ruddy.
The road, studded with apple, pear, and mulberry,
veered, and we lost
the red, dipping
into shade below the Sisters’ cemetery.

He nodded at the oratory, approved
the icons, but when we came
upon the chapel, and I explained
holy wine inside the tabernacle,
he had to be restrained, thinking
In there, at least. I’ll find a decent wineglass!

3
On the porch, he poured the Sémillon,
then a Gewürztraminer
he matched with salmon, pink slabs
of watermelon, white rinds
lined with green grinning from black plates.
Delicacies he presented two at a time,
now a crown of garlic
now a round of bread.,..

He was ceremonious, stirring the strawberries,
his red hand cool,
too classy to disgrace this novice.
It was she, in fact, who finally did it,
setting down her glass to pose the question,
“How long before we take off our clothes?’

4
Midmorning the day after, he’s gone in a spurt of gravel.
It’s noon before I can resume my life of measure
heeding the bell that calls us to chapel.
‘thinking on death every day.’

Jesus and Bacchus, Jesus and Bacchus, what am I doing?
I’m writing a poem about the god of wine.
Does a wine thief wound the barrel?
Does it matter which vat
(red or white?) we dip from
if it’s rapture
we’re after, why not be drunk by noon?

[from RENDERED INTO PARADISE, Parallel Press, 2002